Inferno

Invade hell

The assignment

Our school project this period was all about emergent game design. We had to develop a game with as many emergent elements as possible, and learned certain techniques to do so.

The game

We made a mobile platformer, where the player would have to invade hell, much like Dante's Inferno. The emergent elements in this game could be seen everywhere; the level generation, the enemy spawning, the way the enemies looked and walked, the weapons the enemy had, etc. The player would have to kill enemies, and could pick up weapons or body parts and use them as his own. Enemies that would spawn next, would be better equipped to fight the player in his current state, thus making the game harder and harder. Unfortunately, we only had six weeks to design the game and make a prototype, so our final prototype only had one type of enemy. This enemy could have different weapons, and the player could switch between his own weapons. The level was randomly generated, and that was about it.

My work on the game

I was one of two programmers on this game, the other one being Borislav Stoev. We divided the work; he worked mostly on the level generation, and I worked mostly on the player and enemies. The biggest challenge was their walking animation. Our level was built up out of random slopes, so their walking animation should change depending on the steepness of the slopes. Also, we wanted to design the system in such a way that the legs of all characters could have different lengths, and could bend in different ways to give them different appearances. Fixing this problem was one of my biggest jobs on this game.
In the time I had left, I also created a little soundtrack for the game, and one of our artists and our game designer had spent a day in the studio recording some voice acting that would fit the story, although we didn't have enough time to build that into the game.